Light of the World

Our annual celebration of Christmas seems to promise more than it delivers. It’s because we often miss the substance of Christmas as we focus more on the lights and wrapping paper. In this message, we’ll discover that the problem isn’t that we set our hopes to high for Christmas. We set them too low. We’ll show how Christians who lived before the first Christmas set their hopes for the first Christmas properly.

Our world was helpless to save itself. We were hell bent on personal destruction, unable and unwilling to understand how we are at the root of all of our problems in life. The story of Christmas is an intervention story. God had to intervene into history and into our lives to give us a new and living hope.

Many churches are known by what they are against. At Hope, we want to be known by what we are for. We are for Jesus. We are for changing lives and eternities. And we are for Lake Country. Since we are for Lake Country, our annual Christmas Offering unleashes a wave of generosity in our community. In this message, we’ll talk about how we’re making this our biggest Christmas Offering yet.

It’s easy to think of heaven as being a cloudy and ethereal place. But the Bible describes a perfect restoration of this world. Since there is perfect world coming, we don’t put our hope in the current world, but sacrificially love because we value the things of the coming world more than this one.

There are many religions that say that everybody gets to go to heaven or gets another chance when they die. Interestingly, there are no religions that say that everybody goes to hell when they die. Are there really two destinations? Would a loving God send anyone to hell? This Sunday we will discover what Jesus had to say about heaven and hell.